Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“Mom, oh my God, this is a horn-dog car!” she said as she threw her bag in the backseat and got in beside me.

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. It carried a shock, as if she had been rubbing her feet on carpeting.

“Sorry,” she said.

We left the parking lot.

“How was the train?” I asked.

“Is this, like, a midlife crisis thing?” she said. “Go out and get a sports car? I thought men did that.”

“Women get Botox,” I said.

“Right, so what gives?”

“Actually,” I said, “this isn’t my car. It’s a rental.”

“The smell. I should have guessed that! Where’s yours?”

We were stopped at a light across from Roscoe Automotive and the Mail Boxes Etc. store. Cars and mail, I thought. Trains.

“Your head looks like a disco ball,” I said.

“Don’t avoid the question.”

“My car is in the garage, and your father is asleep in my bed.”

I could not help baiting her. It was a game we had played since her childhood, who could get the other’s goat, who could create the best exaggeration. Sarah, I knew, had hoped to make this early skill into an art. She was a child of embellishment and stylish turns. What Emily had in stolid substance, Sarah possessed in her ability to distract everyone from the main topic of conversation. That way, no one ever thought to get a real answer to the question of how she was doing. It was what she’d carried into voice classes like a blank check. She could sing well enough, but -and the “but” held everything, both a buoyant magnetism and what I feared might be her incipient version of the family’s insanity.

“Tell the story,” she said.

We passed the hospital, and I picked up speed. I could tell she was feeling good. Her cheeks were flushed as if she had just come from a run. But Sarah didn’t run. She didn’t exercise. Not for her what she called my “gym crucifixion.” She starved sometimes, and sometimes binged. She drank and smoked, and I was sure did other things.

“There is a lot to tell,” I said. “I’d rather not go home just yet. Your father needs to rest anyway. It might be easier if it’s just the two of us.”

“I sense intensity,” she said.

“We’ll go somewhere,” I said, “then I’ll tell you all you want to know.”

“Yow!” she said, but she did not follow up with anything else. As we passed Easy Joe’s Restaurant, I saw her check each rhinestone barrette with her hands. She took its shape between her thumb and forefinger and then tested it to make sure it held.

“Why the braids?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. My hair was wet. Like or not like?”

“They remind me of your grandmother.”

“Not like, got it.”

I knew where I was headed. Hamish had been the first person I’d gone there with in years. In the daytime the farmland invited the eye, and then the towers between the treetops stopped it cold.

As we passed by the Ironsmith Inn and turned left to crest the hill, Sarah sighed loudly.

“No Schlitz?” she asked regretfully.

Without looking in my rearview mirror, I threw the car into reverse and swung backward into the general store’s lot.

“Cash and carry,” I said. “Make it quick.”

“I’m liking this new you,” Sarah said, all lit up. She grabbed my purse from the floor and headed inside. No one could claim that when I broke bad news, I didn’t make sure people had something to prop themselves up with.

I could see her through the window, talking to Nick Stolfuz at the counter. She was using her hands to make a giant circle over her head. Nick laughed and handed her a six-pack with her change. When she reached the door, she turned to wave good-bye.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“I was telling him about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

I backed out of the lot and got onto the road. Sarah popped the tab on a can of Schlitz and slurped the foam with her mouth.

“What led you to that?”

“I told him I lived in New York. He’s always wanted to go up for the parade.”

“The things you don’t know.”

We passed under the keystone tunnel and onto the other side.

“You have to take an interest, Mom. Nick is single, you know.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Damn,” she said, and punched her thigh. “I could have had my own bar. Are we going to the towers lookout?” she asked, getting her bearings.

“Yes.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” she said. An expression I had taught her.

I pulled off the road and onto the gravelly patch where last night Hamish and I had had sex in my car. I was glad for the rental, for the swinging scented tree that hung from the cigarette lighter.

I turned off the ignition.

Sarah sipped at her beer. “Can you open the windows?”

“Better yet, let’s get out,” I said.

“Beer?”

“No.”

She stashed an extra in her coat pocket anyway.

When I stood up, my legs buckled, and I stumbled, whirling around to put my hands on top of the car to steady myself. Sarah came rushing over.

“Mom, are you okay?”

I had seen a detective show on television in which the trademark maneuver of a tough-talking cop was to slam the criminal’s chest so hard into the roof as he pinned him to the car that it made a thumping sound. I watched this show with my mother, and every time this happened, the two of us would giggle. “They call them ‘perps,’ ” she said one night, and I had thought how our moments of ease were so rare anymore that even this stupid television show was something I was grateful for.

“I’m weak, Sarah.”

“Weak? What are you telling me?”

“A weak person,” I said.

I gained my breath. I had begun.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said, and crossed the road. I had never set foot on Forche Lane in all the times I had driven here, but I decided that’s where Sarah and I would walk. It was a one-lane road that was privately owned and full of gaping potholes, from which weeds and wild grass poked out.

“What are you talking about, Mom? Slow down.” She caught up to me, holding the open can of beer in her hand.

“I have to keep walking if I’m going to tell you everything.”

“I hate your exercise shit. Don’t make me pump my arms.”

“I’m weak morally. And who I am does not reflect on you and Emily. That needs to be said up front.”

Sarah ran in front of me and spun around to block my path. The Schlitz foamed up, and a few drops spilled on the ground.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Mom, what is it?”

“Move.”

“No.”

I pushed her aside, then moved to my left a bit to regain the road. Sarah joined me a moment later.

“Okay, I’m listening,” she said.

“I don’t know where to begin.”

On our right, a flock of grouse fled the bushes where they’d been hiding. The air was filled with the beating of wings.

“How about why Dad is here?”

“I called him. He flew out from Santa Barbara last night.”

“Why?” She took a preparatory slug of Schlitz.

I could not do it. Not yet.

“Remember Hamish?”

“Of course.”

“I slept with him last night in my car. Twice. Once in his driveway and once back there, where we parked.”

“No shit!” Sarah said.

“No shit.”

“Hamish, our blond-god doofus?”

“Yes.”

“That’s your moral weakness? Granted, not the usual thing, but cool, very very cool.”

We walked on. Forche dropped down after the part of the road that I had always been able to see from my car. Here the pavement gave way to dirt.

“So is that it?” Sarah asked.

“No.”

“Well, what?”